The New Beachhutman Blog

She died while I was on holiday, hooked up to drips and instruments, as expected.

Joan had been that best of good neighbours when we moved here back in the early 90s. Gossipy, but not nasty. True, she had a "bit of a feud" with Rossacrosstheroad, and they argued like ferrets in a sack about the hedge between them, but she was at heart a good sort. Out and about in her old car, she'd spend most of the day and days out helping in local charities.

She' d been left well off when her husband had died a long long time ago. But most of her money went on others. She helped in charity shops, supported the animal sanctuaries, did chores and housework for a variety of what SHE called “old ladies”, took in a wide variety of stray animals (including the late unlamented shithound).

While we were away she'd "do the cats" and take in the mail. Later when my wife left me, she refused to believe the lies. It might not have helped much, but she told her exactly what she thought of those claims about me. She watched the house, she kept an eye, and a sharp tongue, on the kids on the street. She helped, when I worked away in the week, to stop fraudsters' mail getting to the Aged Parent. I had a deal – she wouldn’t take any money for her help, so about every two weeks a mysterious dog food fairy would leave a bag of tinned dog food on her doorstep.

She was also a lonely woman, and with this came wind-baggery. Often I had to almost shoo her off my doorstep when she was settling in for a good hour or two of gossip. Actually, I couldn’t stand her politics, and some of her opinions were actionable in today’s PC world. 

Then disaster struck. She began to fall over at odd times. Once she had to be brought home on a stretcher. We all told her she was just pissed, but she insisted she never touched a drop (not QUITE true, but like a lot of her generation she didn't think Baileys was alcohol. She wasn't a minor piss artist like my Aged Parent, who will be starting in on the sherry or gin at noon "to pull myself together!")

Then the doctor, at first puzzled, told her she had Motor Neuron Disease. We all pooh-poohed the suggestion. But it took hold quite fast, and before we knew it she was confined to a wheelchair. At some stage she was regretting not being able to go on her annual cruise to the sun, and I got onto P and O, who said that of course they would take her, as long as she was still able to take care of herself. At that time she could. But then her doctor said, "I wouldn’t advise it, really", and sadly, she decided not to go. She always regretted it, later saying how she would have jumped overboard and ended it all. Maybe.

She began to sink under the MND, the wheelchair giving way to the day-chair, her speech going, and her muscle control with all the consequences. Her house modified, her life run by others. Soon she had to have a team of carers.

Through this, for more than two years now, I would try and bring her a bit of cheer at weekends. At first I'd do her a lunch on the two days, usually something a bit more exotic than she could expect from meals on wheels. Then one weekend a carer I hadn’t met said to me, as I brought in the tray, "Thanks, we'll liquidise it later".

So I stopped the plated meals, and simply made her a good soup on each Saturdays and Sunday, leaving a spare in her fridge if I had to be out at midday. Then a few weeks ago I found that the final stage of MND had started, the inability to swallow. Shortly after, just before I went on holiday, she stopped taking any food, and was rushed into hospital. The end came a week later.

Joan raged against the unfairness of MND. At first she denied it and refused to take the drugs. Then, realising she was indeed going to die of it, she refused to take them to hurry the end. Modern care and more drugs overcame these strategies, she was unable to resist, and they kept her alive, in her own once loved house, unable to do anything, incontinent, not even turn the pages of the dally mail she insisted on having to the very end. Once she was taken into a hospice for a respite period, and told several of the cancer sufferers she met that THEY were lucky, they were going to die quickly. That made her pretty unpopular, and she wasn’t invited back.

If there was ever a case for voluntary suicide, Joan made it real for me. To see a once active, much loved neighbour, wracked by the terminal stages of a long drawn out death, unable to hasten the end, forced into the indignity of being fed, washed, toileted, dressed and undressed by young carers, finally reduced to a stare of near vegetation, is terrible. Those bloody Bishops can bash the bible all they damn well want, but for those of no faith like Joan, indeed for many of those of any faith, the Bishops’ blocking of the voluntary suicide bill recently, with its promise of a self-determined, nearly dignified death,  was a crime against humanity.

So Joan Hughes, I won't insult your memory with talk of "the other side", of heaven or hell, of "going on ahead”.  I'll just say I was glad to have known you, you made this street, this town,  a better place in your own way, and you will be missed.